 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. Welcome back everyone. You are watching theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Tom Yates. He is the deputy CIO of Howard County. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Sure, great to be here. So tell our viewers a little bit about your role. I'm the deputy CIO for Howard County and anything that you receive in terms of services from a county government, from trash pickup to emergency responder services, police fire, emergency notification, recon parks, all of those departments are our clients inside our IT. Okay, so you just, that's absolutely, you just painted this version of being a citizen and all of the things that you go to, all the services that you receive. So now tell me the idea that you had in the CIO department to change that. Well, it started with pain. So when I started about three years ago, our IT department really didn't know what we didn't know in terms of what was on our network. And I was the new guy and I started running the Change Management Meeting, which is an internal IT meeting. And I approved a change that ended up causing a four hour outage. And that's when we really started looking for a platform that would give us visibility into our network. So it really started out internal IT, focus on uptime. I got a demo of discovery from a vendor in the area and I was hooked at that point because that's exactly what I was looking for to run these change meetings. I want to know what's connected to what. I want to be able to map business services to our particular configuration items. So that was really important to me. But then once you start getting into the platform, it's very sticky and it's very workflow oriented. And you see all of these processes across your organization that are siloed, that are paper based. And so we just saw the platform as a great place to aggregate that type of workflow and business process automation. And it's sort of evolved from there. And what we have recently thought about is a way to connect our citizens to a portal using the CSM platform that would allow them to have one place, one sign on where they could go in and have access to the full range of services that our county government provides. So how will that work? I mean, can you just describe what it's like to be a citizen in Howard County? Sure, Howard County, for those of you who don't know is located right between Washington DC and Baltimore. We're a fairly affluent county. The citizenry is very connected and involved and they have high expectations of government. So we provide services like trash, water bills, you name it, people will come on to our website and they'll want to pay their water bill or they want to check the status of a permit or a license request that they have or they'll want to get information on their property tax bills, just normal stuff. You have to go to a different system and have a different login account for each one of those services. And so the feedback that we're getting and for me as well as a Howard County citizen is that's not really the best way to present our county. So what if there were a way to have a single sign on and provide access with transparency and accountability where you could go in and see the status of your permit request in real time without having to call anyone because the younger you are, the less desire you have to talk on the telephone. So we're looking at different ways to interact with our citizens and to have government be there when they are ready to interact with government, not when government is ready to be interacted with. And government fair enough has a tough reputation. I mean, you think about any government, any time you have to interact with a government, it's tedious, it's time consuming, it's inefficient. So what is your sort of mission in all of this? What's your overarching objective? I would like to treat our citizens like they're human beings. That's a worthy goal. I have a memory of what it's like to go to the DMV and wait in line and not be treated as customer service oriented as you feel like you should be treated. One of the nice things that we have in our county is our government employees really care. And we're looking to build some of these automations so that they don't get distracted by the busy work and they can really focus on what matters. And what matters is taking care of our clients, the citizens of the county. And are you hoping that it will drive civic engagement too? Absolutely, so one of the things that we're doing is we're piloting a CSM implementation for one of our council districts. So Howard County's broken into five council districts and the council is like the legislative branch. The county executives like the governor. So they all receive questions, issues, complaints from the citizens that are in their particular districts. And we're looking at having this platform as a way for the citizens to interact with their legislators as well as report trees down, potholes and things like that, where then the council person interacts back with the administration. So it can get really interesting, especially if you have state legislators that are involved that are outside of our county. So now we have external resources and finding out, just discovering the workflows of what the process is to most efficiently take care of some of these issues is the information that we're looking to extract, put in a business process and then automate that workflow. Now, how are you going to measure the return on investment? I mean, is it really just shortening the time to value or how else are you thinking about how you're going to measure its value? So with government measuring value is a lot different than it is in the private industry. What I look for inside IT is uptime. If there is a tool that we can have that will prevent us from shooting ourselves in the foot in IT and accidentally causing an outage, that has value. That's actual value in terms of people's hours of lost productivity that we can not have. In terms of value to the citizens, I think it would be you hear the feedback from people that they're able to interact with the government more smoothly and efficiently and have that level of transparency and accountability that people during election cycles talk about. And then after the election, we need to deliver. How are you at this conference? I mean, we hear so much about customers being here. This is a really customer-centric event. Are you talking to other customers learning from them? Are best practices emerging? Are you getting ideas that you're going to take back with you to Howard County? Absolutely, and I have a lot of friends in local government and state government that are here, but I get more value really talking from the commercial clients because we are going to be just by definition of government a little bit farther back on the adoption curve. So for a government, I think we're on the cutting edge, but there are things that are being done by private companies. Like I saw what Comcast is doing, and Comcast is another one of the companies that has a reputation, I'll leave it at that, but they're taking active measures to improve their customer response. And as a Comcast customer, I totally appreciate that because I would have issues sometimes finding the time to block off, say, an hour to be on a call with Comcast during business hours, right? So the things that they're doing, a really cool chat bot, machine learning, AI, to help people self-discover what the answers to common problems are, building knowledge into their platform. I think seeing that and seeing how I as a customer interact with that and appreciate that, we just take that and flip it over to the government side. So what's next for you? Well, I would really like to get that 311 system. It's going to be a journey, because we do have a lot of systems with a lot of different logins. I think the step that we would like to take first is create that portal where the citizen can register. And then after that, we just take the applications that they're using and we bring them in behind the covers. So we're basically skinning those applications with one login, but it might be a little clunky at the beginning until we get them more integrated. Over time, the idea is we just drive that traffic to that one location. So regardless of what new service we offer or what you're looking for, you'll know that there's one place that you can go to get it and you get it when you want it, not when we want to give it to you. Finally, we've heard so much about this transforming role of the CIO and it's a much broader role today than it was even five or 10 years ago. I mean, what's your personal experience with that? I have been with Howard County government for three years and during those three years, I've seen a big change in the way IT is viewed inside government because we are now business partners with our client departments, as opposed to that shop that you call when something's broken or I need a computer. Technology is everywhere now and I think it's so permeated every facet of our organization that people want to have those conversations. Now, they want to say, what can we do with technology that could help us, especially in the age of budget freezes and hiring freezes, you know, everybody needs to do more with less and the only way to do that consistently is with technology. Tom, that's a great final note to close on. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It's been a really fun talking to you. I'm Rebecca Knight. This has been theCUBE's coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18.